Twin Peaks: The Return

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                                   #35th Film of 2023

‘I’ll see you again in 25 years. meanwhile…’ - Twin Peaks S2 Finale

David Lynch kept his promise and 25 years later delivered us The Return: serving both as a sequel to the iconic television series which changed the landscape of TV, and to the (at the time) much maligned masterpiece ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’.

‘It is happening again’!

Spoilers ahead

The first episode of The Return was insanely bizarre. Obviously we’ve come to expect this from Lynch, but likewise Twin Peaks fans expected a return to the quaint town and answers to the doppelgänger situation. We got none of that. Instead for the first two episodes we’re mostly focused on seemingly random plots. One involving a weird room with some tv box which a young man must observe constantly, and another involving a very bizarre murder. We also follow evil Cooper and his criminal life. But none of this seems to relate to the original series, and we’re just confused and waiting for the REAL Cooper to return.

But Lynch isn’t ready for that.

This is an incredible and powerful work of art and I’ve procrastinated this review for a while since I feel I must write something profound for something so profound, but I can’t.
Instead I’m going to share some thoughts that I have.

We’re initially shocked and confused at the weird departure from the original series but soon I began to settle into what The Return is and get immersed into this similar but different world. This lacks the warmth and heart of the original series, an intentional decision by Lynch probably to depict what has happened to the world with evil being freed.

Episode 8 is a very cool and very Kubrick-esque depiction of the birth of evil in this Twin Peaks world. In the original series there’s this general attitude that we’re led to believe in that Twin Peaks is a nice peaceful town and the evil there is a new arrival. But there are hints like the line from Sheriff Harry Truman (funnily named exactly like the president all though I’m not sure why) that there’s been a hidden evil within the forests for a long time. However, these ideas aren’t fully fleshed out until episode 8 of The Return. We see the origins of Judy and Bob which seem to stem from human evil in the form of the atomic bomb (which we can see as the greatest evil of humanity) and its early testing. The tests result in the creation of weird evil which then takes root in the world. We also see the counter act of creating Laura Palmer, probably as the ‘good’ to fight this evil. However, Laura isn’t really ‘good’. She’s not evil but certainly not some force of light and morality. However, her tragic life and death gives rise to the investigation and thus brings about Cooper, and Gordon Cole etc… who not only shed light on the horrors in Laura’s life but also on other secrets in Twin Peaks like the situation with the mill, the terrible abuse from Leo and so on.

Also it’s funny how David Lynch inserts himself as the DIRECTOR of the FBI.

I spent the whole show waiting for Dougie to really become Cooper and at times it was painful, but also there were so many hilarious times. The casino, the situation with the Mitchum brothers, the assassination attempt etc…
But still my favourite scene will always be his awakening after the big SHOCK.

Then there’s some ambiguity about the big scene where Bob is destroyed: namely this idea that ‘we live inside a dream’ and the overlay of Coop’s face on the screen.  We can link this line to the dream Director Cole has of being in a cafe with the real life Monica Bellucci who asks ‘but who is the dreamer?’ Here we can take that to mean we are in our real world, and maybe Lynch’s character looking back towards his younger self is him looking towards us as the audience suggesting we are the dreamer. But alsp there’s a cleaner way of interpreting this as Lynch being the dreamer who dreams up Twin Peaks. This is obviously a fact. And we then share in his dream, this is another fact.

“We’re like the dreamer, who dreams and then lives inside the dream. But who is the dreamer?” - Monica Bellucci

WE’re like the dreamer.

The Medium writer ‘peak fever dream’ points out that this quote is in reference to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad:

‘We create our world, and then enter into that world. We live in the world that we have created. When our hearts are pure, then we create the beautiful, enlightened life we have wished for.”

This writer then says we can infer from this that when our hearts are impure we will create something dark instead of beautiful.

But what does this all mean?

I don’t really know.

But I do know that the first mention of this line (WE LIVE INSIDE A DREAM) was by Phillip Jeffries and Fire Walk With Me. He seems afraid whilst trying to explain, albeit in a confusing and cryptic manner, the things he has seen involving these spirits above a convenience store. Reddit user smoothietime has this to say: 

Jeffries says "I found something in Seattle at Judy's, and then, there they were. And they sat quietly for hours... And I followed." After a long groaning, he starts to say "The ring... The ring..." The 'something' that Jeffries found is undoubtedly The Ring. The same ring that we know caused Agent Chet Desmond to go missing. This implies that The Ring allows people to travel to these 'dream' places, and that Jeffries 'followed' the Dugpas (evil sorcerers) he saw, becoming obsessed. 

Director Cole says ‘Mayday’ and this triggers something within Jeffries who then says  "May... February... 1989". I think ‘May’ is irrelevant, it’s only a word which he hears from the Directer which makes him think about months and dates and then the important date ‘February 1989’ when Laura Palmer was killed. Of course this is taking place prior to that, more than a year prior. So is this a premonition? Did he see something? He speaks with a tone of fear, he’s trembling, this would make sense if he had a hint of what’s to come.

In the Missing Pieces we see him get transported to some hotel in Buenos Aires. He asks ‘what year is this?’ Is he trying to find out whether the killing has happened yet?

Now back to the ring and a Reddit post from user lowlize:

And remember: where did Chet Desmond find the ring? Beneath the Chalfonts' trailer... Carl Rodd told Cooper that before the Chalfonts stayed there, the spot was occupied by other Chalfonts as well... and in S3E18 Alice Tremond tells Cooper that the previous owners of the house were the Chalfonts.

The Chalfont Tremond situation has confused me since the beginning… it still does. But an interesting point to note is that the woman who occupies the house at the end of the show is in fact the real owner in real life. This is another moment of reality breaking through like the Monica dream. Does this mean Cooper has been transported to our world? Also in the show the woman says the previous owners were called Chalfont. And of course she says her name is Alice Tremond. I’m not sure what to make of this but that same Reddit user points out something interesting.

In the meeting above the convenience store we see ‘the Jumping Man, Mrs. Chalfont and her grandson. And we know about the connections between them and Sarah (Judy): Sarah Palmer's face can be seen superimposed over the Jumping Man's mask both the times he appears in The Return (in scenes set above the convenience store), thus suggesting he could potentially be Sarah's form as a Lodge spirit. This is even more interesting considering the strong evidence for Sarah being the human host of Judy. Furthermore, Tremond/Chalfont's grandson wears a mask very similar to that of the Jumping Man and is also seen to jump in a similar fashion, suggesting that the two spirits could be related, and this relation parallels the one between the Chalfonts/Tremonds and the Palmers we get from S3E18 finale.’

We end with Laura Palmer’s scream of recognition. This scream pervades everything around it, it’s the most powerful sound in the work as is illustrated throughout the world of Twin Peaks. Her scream is featured throughout the final parts of the show. We see Cooper try to save her from her demise by going back in time through a dream of sorts. He tries and fails as she seems to disappear from his grasp and we hear her screams. We can assume this means her death. If Cooper saves her then there is no investigation and hence no Twin Peaks and hence nothing. So she must die. That can be seen as the basis of the dream.

In the original series she was a device to be sacrificed for our own enjoyment of mystery. We later discover her to be the crux of everything. We sympathise with her struggle and want to save her, but we can’t because we would have never cared had she not died. We would have never known her suffering had Cooper not investigated her death.

She must die to create the dream. But who is the dreamer?